The Fiscal Years table can be used to link contracts or other records to particular fiscal years for reporting or budget management.  It is pre-populated with about 30 fiscal years based on a fiscal year start date of July 1. 

Each fiscal year record has a start and end date, a description of the fiscal year and a numeric version of the fiscal year.  The Years from Current Year field is used for reporting purposes and to identify the current fiscal year and any other years in relationship to it.  The current year has a value of 0, while the preceding year is -1, the next year is 1, and so on.  This way, searches for reports can be created to find records for this fiscal year and next (i.e. those whose Years from Current year =0 or 1) or this year and the two previous (Years from Current year is Less than 1 and more than -3), and so on.

Each record has a field called Date of Next Update which should be set to the start of the next fiscal year, once you start using this table.  

A time based rule runs monthly on the first of the month and looks for a match on this value (it assumes that the fiscal year starts on the first of the month).  If it matches, that is, today is the first day of the next fiscal year, it adds one year to this date field and decrements the Years from Current Year by -1 on all records to update their relationship to the current year.  This rule is disabled out-of-the-box and should be turned on if you plan to use this functionality.

If you need to use fiscal years, but for a different fiscal year period, export the existing data, then delete the demo data, customize the export file with new start and end dates for each year, and import new records going as far into the past and future as makes sense for your application.